Biography of Percival G. Lowe

Percival G. Lowe, for many years prominent in the public affairs of the city and county of Leavenworth, worth, was, in his young manhood, a typical plainsman and Kansas dragoon. He was essentially a man of action, and his only literary production in book form, “Five Years a Dragoon,” presents many cloarcut pictures of those early times. As a life-member and president (1893) of the State Historical Society he has also placed on record many valuable papers dealing with those subjects with which he was so practically identified. Mr. Lowe was born at Randolph, Coos County, New York, September 29, 1828, spent much of his boyhood and youth in Lowell, Massachusetts, and before he was twenty-one had spent three years upon the seas, engaged mainly in voyages to the West Indies and South America. In 1849 he joined the regular army and was stationed at Fort Leavenworth.

In 1854, at the conclusion of his five-years’ service in the United States army, Mr. Lowe was appointed superintendent of transportation for Maj. E. A. Ogden, and was engaged in the construction of Fort Riley. He served as master of transportation both in General Sumner’s expedition against the Cheyennes, in 1857, and for General Johnson’s army sent against the Mormons in 1858. In the following year he severed his connection with the army and engaged in business in Denver and Leavenworth, finally making the latter city his home. He married Margaret E. Gartin, in June, 1861, and, in the course of his butiness ventures, the couple journeyed twice across the plains. Mr. Lowe served in the Leavenworth City Council in 1868, 1869 and 1875; as sheriff of the county from 1876 to 1881, and as a member of the State Senate in 1885-89. His death occurred at San Antonio, Texas, March 5, 1908, and he was buried beside his wife, who had died three years before, in the military cemetery at Leavenworth.